Comment by jerf

I seem to read more fiction now than I ever have, but much of it now slips through publishing (and editing)

So novels that start like that make me read uphill. Way better to plunge into the book.

The first few lines of books I recently liked...

"DEATH CAME FOR him through the trees."

"Gallegher played by ear, which would have been all right had he been a musician - but he was a scientist. A drunken and erratic one, but good."

“Like any good story, it began with a girl. It was supposed to end with a bullet."

"The level was at his top lip now. Even with his head pressed hard back against the stones of the cell wall his nose was only just above the surface. He wasn’t going to get his hands free in time; he was going to drown."

a little conflicted on this one:

"ON TUESDAY, OCTOBER 11, 1988, the Jason Taverner Show ran thirty seconds short. A technician, watching through the plastic bubble of the control dome, froze the final credit on the video section, then pointed to Jason Taverner, who had started to leave the stage. The technician tapped his wrist, pointed to his mouth."

The books that made me read uphill in sentence 1 loosely correlate with the rest of the book.

Makes me think of the MrBeast pdf from yesterday wrt the first crucial seconds of a youtube video.

it has four, going on five, esoteric proper nouns in one sentence. it's not hard to parse, but it isn't something I love reading either.

I'm reminded of the Illuminatus Trilogy, which at times is barely more than proper nouns arranged into sentences at random. like Finnegan's Wake but with more flower power

I also enjoy the non-standard punctuation, e.g. F'lax -- how would you pronounce that?

As a sci-fi writer who likes a spot of silly world-building myself, this line doesn't seem particularly absurd to me, but it does paint me a mental image of something the author very likely didn't intend to communicate:

Picture a world whose surface is covered in an ocean of hyper-oxygenated dense fluid (like the kind used in liquid-breathing experiments.)

(The fluid isn't cold! The "freezing" isn't a description of the temperature, but of motion ceasing.)

Now imagine this fluid with the appearance of a gel ant farm, with eaten-through trails in it — but rather than these trails being hollow, they're full of a cotton-candy-like pink "fluff".

Why? Through some kind of chemical reaction, exhalation of the now-CO2-saturated-and-warmed fluid into the medium, causes the formation and rapid expansion of a (pink!) aerogel, where the "gel" is "something from the fluid, plus water from your breath" and the "aero" is "nitrogen and CO2".

This aerogel is neutrally or even positively buoyant relative to the dense medium — so it doesn't fall or pour out of your mouth, but rather worms its way out, curving around your face in a random, pretzel-like extrusion pattern, fighting its way out, pushing against the working fluid.

I would imagine that, to continue to breathe safely in this strange medium, you would have to 1. always breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth; and 2. ensure that the reaction product of your exhalation doesn't linger to stick to your face as it forms.

So the optimal way to survive, would be to constantly, briskly walk backward, with this exhalation product extruding away from you like a rocket engine's exhaust (or perhaps more like spaetzle) as you walk.

I imagine you would frequently walk through trails of (your own or others') exhalation product. Which might feel somewhat like walking through gathered up hunks of spiderweb.

I also imagine that this reaction would probably be happening to some degree in your throat and lungs as well, rapidly giving you something like silicosis. Depending on how much tension you want in the plot, you could either just embrace this as "putting a timer on" getting off this planet; or you could posit that the character would be able to pry just the filter from their rebreather, using it to ensure that the reaction never occurs inside of them (but further increasing the strain of breathing in this medium.)

The atmosphere isn't homogenized perfectly, leading to turbulent condensation.

Micheal Crichton's Sphere mentions this (actual) fact in regards to certain gases, such as Helium, being needed in high pressure environments to counter act oxygen poisoning and nitrogen narcosis, but due to differing thermal properties, can lead to hot/cold spots, thermal turbulence, etc.